Buck brings color (swatches) to Sherwin-Williams’ world

Update: Buck kindly created a making of video for Motionographer to break it down for yall. Also, I sat down with creative leads Orion Tait, Benjamin Langsfeld & Joshua Harvey and asked them a few questions about the project.Watch and learn.

Buck’s latest animation explores a world created by color swatches for paint manufacturer Sherwin-Williams. The first part of a bigger campaign, Buck plans to release two more spots to follow this, which according to creative director Orion Tait, has allowed “a bit more story-telling, which is a natural evolution for the campaign and has officially made this job an office favorite. We love working in the space where storytelling, design and animation meet.”

One of the things I dig the most about this animation is a technique they utilized to pull the spot off within the considerable time constraints they had. I asked Orion if the color grading for the spot was a nightmare since Sherwin-Williams would be considerably more picky then most client on the accuracy of their color choices (imagine color comments along the lines of, “this looks more like Husky Orange than Rave Red”..real names by the way). Orion told me that in order to relieve some of that pressure on the 3d end of the pipeline, Buck decided to render their scenes in grayscale and handle all the color and paint names completely in comp. Making for a much more interactive and controllable color correction experience for Buck.

This technique also accidentally lead to a more unique, illustrative look to the entire spot. A happy accident that creates a gray under-painting to the entire spot leaving it looking..well, more painted then most cg spots would otherwise.

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14 Comments

Nice spot.. clean and fluid as usual.. don’t expect anything less of BUCK.

one flaw I did see, however..

In the reflection of the frog, as he jumps. It looks like that reflection is just the primitives used to rig and animate the frog.. not the actual underside of the frog model we see jumping.. must have been a small thing that slipped by them.

Ah. its just perfect. This is the kind of project you wish a client would walk in and ask you to execute: “make a stylized world entirely out of colorful paint chips”.
Not entirely unlike the similarly awesome request: “Make an entire world out of UPS carboard boxes”
yes, please.
nice work Buck, you guys did it beautifully. can’t wait to see the other spots.